Silicon photonics startup Ayar Labs today announced the successful raising of $500 million in Series E funding, aiming to accelerate the mass production of its co-packaged optics (CPO) technology. The round was led by Neuberger Berman, with participation from industry giants such as NVIDIA and MediaTek. Notably, just a day before this announcement, NVIDIA had announced an investment of $4 billion in photonics network suppliers Coherent and Lumentum, highlighting its aggressive strategy in the field of photonic interconnects.

Chip

Core Pain Point: Breaking the "Physical Limit" of Copper Wires

With the rapid growth of AI model sizes, traditional copper interconnects have become a bottleneck for computing power expansion. When transmission rates exceed 800Gbps, the transmission distance of copper cables is limited to just a few meters, and they face challenges of high power consumption and error rates.

Ayar Labs’s core product TeraPHY chip offers a revolutionary alternative:

  • Ultra-high bandwidth: The latest reference design integrates eight TeraPHY chips, achieving a total bandwidth of up to 200Tbps per package, about seven times that of NVIDIA Rubin GPU (28.8Tbps).

  • Low power consumption and long-distance transmission: Compared to traditional pluggable optical modules, CPO technology directly integrates the optical module within the GPU package, significantly reducing power consumption and latency, and the link is not restricted by a single rack.

  • Scalability: This technology supports connecting up to 10,000 GPUs in an extended domain, while keeping the rack power density around 100kW.

Ayar Labs was founded in 2015 and has long maintained technical cooperation with Intel and DARPA. Currently, the company is collaborating with GlobalWafers (GUC) and Alchip to develop reference designs, ensuring the transition of the technology from prototype to large-scale commercialization.